She has forgotten the version of me that deserved to be left. I am going to become, before she remembers, the version that deserves to be stayed with.
Whatever it takes.
“Fox?” she murmurs, after a while.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Tell me something true,” she says drowsily.
I think about that.
“You make everything better than it is,” I confess. “That’s just who you are. And I was too”—I swallow, righting my heart that’s raw with emotion—“in my own head to say so when I should have.”
We stay like that until her breathing evens out and the tension in her hand releases.
She sleeps, her fingers still loosely wrapped around mine.
I don’t move.
I will not move.
I will stay here for as long as she needs.
I look at the fig tree through the window and hear her words from before she left,“The fig tree needs water…every other day until the heat breaks.”
It’s not just the fig tree, sweetheart. I need to water our relationship, and not every other day, but every minute of every day for the rest of our lives.
18
OSCAR WORTHY
LUCY
Icome clean to Dina four weeks after I come home, on the first morning Fox actually leaves for the office—because I insisted I needed space, and Percy, at my quiet request, insisted that Fox was needed at work. It also helped that Dr. Reyes, at our appointment two days ago, suggested I have normal human interaction without my husband hovering, which Fox took not as a directive but as a personal challenge to hover more efficiently, until I put my wobbly foot down.
“All good on the marital front?” Dina asks, setting tea in front of me.
I love coffee, but these days it makes my stomach raw—probably from the pills. Broken ribs are the worst. There’s nothing to do but wait for them to heal and manage the pain in the meantime.
“Hmm.” I lean back into the cushions.
Dina sits on the coffee table across from me. “Talk to me.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Something is up,” she says, before I can deflect. “I can feel it coming off you like radio waves.”
I wrinkle my nose. Sigh. “I didn’t lose my memory.”
Dina stares at me. “What?”
I shrug.
She looks around the house, then back at me. “You mean—you rememberhim.”
I grimace.
She blinks.
